How to Optimize Your Website for Google’s Mobile-First Index

There has been a large increase in the demand for Mobile-first Index. However, it was on the watch since November 2016 but this year the demand for it has just crossed the bars. We all know the maximum users nowadays are from mobile. We do find a portion of users from desktop and tabs too but none can deny the fact how the users from mobile has increased in the recent time. Around 60-70% of the traffic is driven from handset. Analysing the change, Google is pushing it hard on very website to develop a mobile friendly website or web pages.

However, if you haven’t complied with the Google’s policy, you still do have time. Google is taking quite a time to bring in the mobile-first index. In the 2017, Google was calm about the fact but with the beginning of 2018 the company won’t leave any stone unturned and will add this new feature or the mobile-first index to each and every website possible.

What is Mobile- first Index?

If you have read the article so far without even knowing what actually is the Mobile-first Index than you must be curious about it. Thus, this part is all for you.

Well, Mobile-first Index is a policy by Google which suggests Google to determine your website’s ranking on the basis of your mobile site indexing. In the past, all the rankings for your site were taken from the desktop version, even now it happens so but in the near future it is expected to change.

Once the Mobile-first Index is fully functional, it will first take your mobile site first, i.e., m.domain.com. This will surely so an increase in the Smartphone Googlebot crawls to your site due to early sign of mobile-first index on your site.

As the name suggests, Mobile-first Index will look forward for a mobile-friendly website. If your website turns out to be slow on smartphone or handset devices, it will likely affect your page’s ranking. A better user experience should be provided to mobile users in order to rank high.

Some developers try to shorten the content for mobile sites. Although it provides a better UX for the mobile users, the content gap between the mobile site and the desktop site increase vastly. So, just make sure you don’t SEO benefits to your desktop site in order to bring in a better UX for the mobile site.

Tips for Mobile-first Indexing

If you want to provide the same amount of content for both your desktop and mobile site without losing the SEO benefits than you must look down for some tips to improve UX in mobile. This will ensure your content to rank higher than before in Google’s mobile-first index.

Areas to focus on for mobile-first index

Whether a website earns millions or nothing, every website needs to focus on these top areas to rank their website. Basically, we are focusing here the top 3 main parts that you need to make a part of your work plan to rank higher. Well, no particular deadline has been mentioned for the introduction of mobile-first index, but the sooner you do it the better it is for you.

Loading Speed on the Site

The very first area which Google focuses on is the loading speed of your site. A website with good loading speed does provide a better UX to the users and thus it makes complete sense to emphasise on it. Apart from it, the dominating number of mobile-users over desktop-users is what also adds up to the factor. Down below we have provided some way in order to speed up your website UkTVNow

AMP- AMP or the Accelerated Mobile Pages is what we have the most in the year 2017. Well, all the thanks to the HTML used by AMP which helps to load the page faster than the regular HTML. If you have AMP plug-in even Google helps to speed up the website. All these factors come together in order to better the user experience and improve your ranking.

Top Tip – This is another plug-in available for WordPress sites. Top Tip is a recently launched plug-in that focuses on to convert your regular HTML site to a AMP as well as Instant Articles for Facebook.

PWAMP- PWAMP is a combination of AMP HTML, JS and CSS. It includes all the benefits of PWA. Well, PWA is well known as Progressive Web Pages which is an alternative for AMP. Though PWA and AMP provides the same features, the combination of the two is consider to be better than both.

Quality Content

Well, if you are providing content, you have to make sure it is better than all of the providers in the market. Google has complete access on the contents you provide. It means a high-quality content will obviously helps to increase the ranking of your site. All the contents you provide on the desktop site including links, images and video should be the same for your mobile site. This will help you rank higher under Google’s mobile-first index.

Well, the content gap between the mobile site and the desktop site can be checked using the awesome tool known as Screaming Frog tool.

Technical

Well, this can be something new that you have across. However, it is as important as the above two when it comes to mobile-first index. Technical areas that one needs to focus on are basically the following.

Structured Data

Metadata

Hreflang

Social Tags

XML Sitemap and robots.txt

Google Search Console Verification

The mobile-first index is surely at high this year. However slow the Google introduces it but it is sure that the mobile-first index will take down the ranking algorithm this year. Use the article as a source of help and try to improve the areas that are mentioned above. Receiving a 100% in these areas will surely rank your site higher. Remember the sooner you do it, the better it is for you.

Post navigation

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

Search for:

“I’m an IndiBlogger!”

Hi, I am Rahul Yadav a Digital Marketing consultant and SEO expert based in New-Delhi, India. I work with new startups, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and bloggers. I am a Professional Blogger and I write, speak, and consult mostly about How to blog tips, SEO news, products reviews, Inbound Marketing, Social Media marketing etc.